This is a different type of blog post… if you are a reader and come here for book recommendations, this may not interest you. If you are a book blogger as well… I think you want to stick around.
I wanted to make this post because everyone’s journey is different. If your start with book blogging is as slow as mine, I want you not to get discouraged. I also wanted to add a few things I started wrong from the beginning and, if I were to go back, I would definitely do differently.
First things first… the stats… I will show you stats from my youtube, my blog and my twitter, which are the platforms where I am most active.
Youtube Stats
On the whole, I think my journey as a youtube creator, was amazing! If you look at older videos, they have terrible lighting, terrible audio and terrible editing. I focused on improving little by little and I don’t find the audio terrible any more, the editing is decent, the lighting is as good as it’s ever going to be. The main focus for the next year is improving the topics I tackle and making my videos more interesting. I still have no ideas how to achieve that, but I’m studying more successful youtubers for ideas.
These are my stats for long format videos only, since that is my main focus on the youtube channel:
Blog Stats
I think I write better and better. I even started learning more about SEO, but I actually do think I made the same mistake for my blog and my Youtube channel. I wasn’t niched enough. You’d think books is a narrow topic enough… I thought so, but no. It is too much.
Moving forward, whatever I read, I plan on only adding reviews and talk about mostly one genre. I may do some comparisons and some video/blog essays, however, I want to focus more on one genre, build a core of great information about that and then move on.
What do you think about this decision?
Do you tackle only one genre on your blog?
Do you read and follow blogs that tackle multiple genres?
This is my 2022 in views and visitors:
I also wanted to emphasise how the growth came about month by month: as you can see, the first 6 months were practically nonexistent in terms of views, and around 25% of my views came in December, a year after starting. The growth is consistent, but it just takes time for the blog posts to mature.
Overall, I have only one blog post that is actually a success. I wrote 50 this year and to have only one really take off is disappointing, but it is also normal. Moving forward, my main objective is to write more and commit to 2 blog posts a week, instead of one.
Twitter Stats
I won’t comment too much on Twitter, as it is not my main focus, but these are a few facts about my strategy there:
- I only tweet about books and that was a great decision.
- I don’t promote myself too much. I only tweet once about any blog post or video I do and that’s it. I want to keep it this way, for the most part.
- I only follow back accounts that revolve around books so that my feed is always filled with bookish stuff and is a source of inspiration about everything that’s going on on the topic.
- I genuinely love to talk to people there. I generally engage with anyone who talks books, I comment on bookish posts… People feel very real there, at least in my little bubble, and I love that!
As a summary – I tweet about 3 times a week and I managed to have 300 followers. These are all organic, nothing of “follow for follow” type of stuff. As I said, I only follow back myself accounts that are all about books.
Achievements
In 2022, I published 86 videos, 50 blog posts (~ 56k words) and 800 tweets.
These is my creation, all around books! I am so, so proud of myself! 🎉
However, the best thing in all of this is I got to meet lots of awesome people, discovered beautiful, inspiring blogs and read lots of books! If you ever think of starting your own blog, the bookish community is just the best!
Regrets
I wish I started this blog with a better understanding of SEO and a clear goal in mind for it. I wish I had niched my content in the beginning and focused more on a single, smaller topic. I hope doing that in the future will help google understand my blog better and give it more authority. I don’t know what I can achieve around that, but I feel the journey has been amazing so far!
Conclusion
This was a nice look back for me and I plan to be transparent about my stats in the future as well. I think it helps me measure things and keep things in perspective better.
If you think this was interesting in any way, leave me a comment and I will make sure to do this on a monthly basis from now on! 🥰
Read Fine Books 